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Elon Law professor's article selected for popular legal textbook

Associate Dean Enrique Armijo’s legal critique of the "ample alternative channels of communication" principle will be featured in the next edition of an annual guide frequently cited by First Amendment scholars and attorneys.

Associate Dean Enrique Armijo

An Elon Law faculty member’s 2016 article in the Washington & Lee Law Review has been selected for inclusion in a widely read and influential legal treatise on the First Amendment.

“The ‘Ample Alternative Channels’ Flaw in First Amendment Doctrine,” an article by Associate Dean Enrique Armijo, will appear in the next edition of the “First Amendment Law Handbook” published by Thomson Reuters and edited by Dean Rodney A. Smolla of Widener Law in Delaware.

In his law review article, Armijo argues that the Supreme Court’s longstanding principle of “ample alternative channels of communication” when determining government regulation of speech, in fact, distorts the First Amendment. He instead proposes that when evaluating content-neutral government restrictions on speech, courts should ask whether a speaker’s chosen mode is incompatible with the government’s interest in the restriction in question.

In analyzing the “ample alternative channels” principle, the article also undertakes original historical research of Supreme Court case files in the seminal First Amendment case of United States vs. O’Brien.

Armijo is also an affiliate fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and he teaches and researches in the areas of the First Amendment, constitutional law, torts, administrative law, media and internet law, and international freedom of expression.

Armijo’s current scholarship addresses the interaction between new technologies and freedom of speech.